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  Voort checked his sensor board, made sure he was correctly oriented toward their first target.

  There it was, straight ahead. Just past the first stand of trees was the small-craft spacefield, one good-sized hangar in brown and a paved landing square. Arrayed on the square were two rows of four E-wings in Pop-Dog colors and a military shuttle. Men and women ran toward the starfighters on the ground.

  “One to Two. I’m to starboard.”

  “Rage Two, aye.”

  Voort drifted rightward and triggered his lasers. Red beams slashed down into the right-hand row of starfighters, riddling them, punching through canopies and fuselages. One exploded less than a second after Voort passed it. Pop-Dogs turned to run the other way.

  Voort heard Myri’s laserfire and the distinctive sound of lasers chewing up metal. Then the two X-wings were past and out over more trees.

  Voort banked and came around again. Myri stayed on his wing. Once the landing field was directly ahead, Voort could see that all four of his targets were now burning wreckage. So were the shuttle and one of Myri’s E-wing targets.

  “Two, we need to pick off one more. If I miss, it’s yours.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Voort lined up a careful shot on the E-wing nearest the shuttle and fired a burst at it. He saw the beams converge on its fuselage. The craft seemed to implode, then exploded.

  “Confirmed kill, One.”

  “Second target, then.” Voort banked and headed for the distant north end of the base.

  Distant to one traveling on foot, that was. The water-pumping station, screened on three sides by trees and on the fourth by a mountain slope, was in view within moments.

  Voort sent his starfighter into a climb. It started out steep, then went vertical. He rolled axially so his belly now faced west, his canopy east, and Black Crest Mountain to the north was off his right S-foils. On his sensor board he saw Myri hanging tight just to port. “Fall in behind, Two. I’m breaking trail; you’re dropping the first load.”

  “Two here is Two obeying.”

  “You’re fired.” At a couple of kilometers’ altitude, Voort sent his starfighter into a loop. In moments he was headed straight down, pointed at the pumping station. Myri continued her climb for the moment, getting a few seconds’ separation between herself and Voort.

  Voort fired. His lasers hit the pumping station and all around it, a wild scattering of shots compared with the precision he’d demonstrated against the E-wings. He continued firing as the ground and pumping station grew larger with startling speed.

  There was a purpose to his sloppiness. Pop-Dogs, three of them, ran out of the increasingly riddled pumping station.

  Voort pulled out at two hundred meters and checked his sensors. There seemed to be nothing in the air that hadn’t been there before—normal airspeeder traffic off in the civilian lanes.

  He watched Myri descend. She came down at the same vertical angle he had chosen. Voort tensed—not from worry over Myri’s skill as a pilot, but from worry about the barely tested rocketry bolted to her wings.

  At half a klick, she fired. A gout of flame lanced down from her starboard wing. A fraction of a second later she fired again, and her port-side rocket launched. Both devices flashed down to ground level on columns of fire.

  The first rocket hit the station’s roof and detonated. The second shot through the center of the fireball. The fireball got bigger.

  Voort took a recon pass over the target. He couldn’t see anything through the smoke cloud, but his sensors showed that the hole in the pumping station went a long way down—a hundred meters at least.

  He sent his starfighter into another climb. “Direct hit, Two. And the shaft is open. I’m going to drop my load for luck.”

  “I’m covering you.”

  At two klicks up, he started his second loop and began one last descent, straight toward the smoke cloud. Sensors still showed a deep hole ahead. His targeting bracket locked on the shaft’s bottom and he launched both rockets. Then he leveled off.

  Myri swung into position off his port wing. She waited until the sound of the twin detonation reached them before she spoke. “I think they’ll be taking the stairs from now on.”

  “I think you’re right. Next stop, Skifter Station. Not too fast, now.”

  They sent their X-wings into a steep climb.

  The technician from the security firm waved unnecessarily as the two Kura City Guard speeders crested the old courthouse building, descended, and came in for a landing in the lot just outside Major Saving’s Army Surplus. City guards piled out of the two vehicles—two investigators in civilian dress, two uniformed troopers in riot gear.

  The investigators, a Mon Calamari man and a human woman, stepped forward. The senior of the two, the Mon Cal, looked the security technician over. “You’re Yinkle?”

  “Yes, sir. I—”

  “Funny name, Yinkle.”

  Yinkle tried not to grit his teeth. “I know. I’ve heard that all my life. I—”

  The Mon Cal indicated himself. “Detective Sergeant Husin.” He gestured at his partner. “Detective Biller.”

  “Yes. Hello.” Impatient, Yinkle held up his datapad, which showed a map of this sector of the city with a line transcribed on it. “The client’s rescue transmitter was activated when she was grabbed last night, but it switched off right away. Then it went live again just a few minutes ago. Right here where I’m standing. The track of its movements says it went right in that door.”

  The Mon Cal gave him a hard, emotionless stare. “This had better not be a mistake.”

  “It’s not.” Yinkle was diverted by the distant sound of explosions to the south, clearly audible over the ongoing wail of alarms. Moments later everyone in the lot could see smoke climbing above Black Crest Mountain—and two X-wing starfighters, climbing much faster, headed for space. “Interesting day we’re having.”

  “Army business. Not our problem. Come on.” The Mon Cal led the way to the door into the army-surplus store.

  There was no one in the open office area beyond the door, but a short, burly woman arrived at a full run in response to the Mon Cal’s hammering knock. Frowning, she looked harassed. Her eyes opened even wider as she saw the uniformed troopers. “Can I, uh, help you?”

  The Mon Cal displayed his identicard, emblazoned with the seal of the city guard. “We have no search warrant. But we’re invoking act thirteen, paragraph six of the Uniform Planetary Code. We have compelling reason to believe that there is a crime in progress and lives are in danger.”

  “Stay here. Let me call my supervisor.” The woman reached for the door controls.

  The Mon Cal stepped into the doorway.

  The door shut anyway, slamming him into the jamb. Yinkle saw that the man was pinned, helpless, and under his arm could see the woman run to the office desk and reach into a drawer.

  The human detective, stooping to see between the Mon Cal’s legs, aimed a blaster pistol and fired. Her shot, not a stun bolt, took the woman in the ribs. She collapsed, a hold-out blaster dropping from her nerveless fingers.

  The Mon Cal grunted, grabbed the doorjamb with big finny hands, and heaved. The door mechanism whined; then flames erupted from the very top and bottom of the door, where actuators would be located. The door slammed open and stayed that way.

  The Mon Cal glanced at his partner. “I owe you a drink. Call in for an ambulance and backup. Yinkle, I’m willing to concede that something may be wrong here.”

  “Thank you.”

  Tracing the line on the datapad map, Yinkle led them down the hall from which the woman had emerged. At the end were double doors; the transparent panels in them showed warehouse beyond. But Yinkle indicated a door to the left just before that point.

  The door opened into a spacious, empty computer center.

  The Mon Cal gave Yinkle a dubious look. “Your map may be off.”

  “No, sir.”

  The back wall of the room, seemingly ordinary and featu
reless, shot up. Beyond it was a lift car with metal-mesh walls, rough stone visible beyond them.

  On the floor of the lift car lay two bodies, a man and a woman in the uniforms of Pop-Dogs from the base, and on a hover cart lay a third body—Ledina Chott.

  The Mon Cal looked at Yinkle again. “That your client?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well done.” He looked at the Pop-Dogs and sighed. “I hate making big discoveries. They don’t usually end well.”

  Ledina came to full consciousness, her body jerking in fear reaction, but the man leaning over her looked thin and harmless, not military at all. Above his head was a sound-dampening ceiling.

  Groggy, Ledina looked at him. “Where am I?”

  “You’re in a store. Your captors brought you here. My name is Kadd Yinkle. I’ve saved you.”

  “Yinkle?” She frowned, trying to think. “That’s a funny name.”

  He sighed and put his head in his hands. “Anyway, the others have gone down to scope out whatever’s below us. All the city guards you’ll ever want to see are headed this way, so you’re safe.” He looked up and gave her a reassuring stare. “No more unpleasant surprises for you.”

  The back wall of the room shot up, revealing rough-walled lift shaft ... and no lift. Ledina and Yinkle stared at it.

  From a point above the door, two figures swung down and landed on the floor just inside the room. Both were men clad head to toe in black stretch material. Their hoods concealed their features, but the bigger one looked human, and the shape of the other one’s head, horns protruding through the stretch cloth, suggested he was Devaronian.

  Yinkle moved around to stand between Ledina and the intruders. “I’m putting you two under citizen’s arrest.”

  They hurried forward, flanked him, passed by him on either side, and rushed out the door.

  Yinkle looked down at Ledina. “Well, I could have tackled them, of course. But my primary mission here is to protect you.”

  Out in the speeder, Trey discarded his hood, replaced his headset, and pulled on a gold-and-black jacket. Now, from the waist up, no longer clad in a skintight nightsuit, he would look normal to anyone viewing him through the vehicle’s viewports.

  Off in the distance to the east he could see oncoming airspeeders in city guard colors, blue and red. He put his own speeder into motion, cruising slowly away from the vicinity of the storefront, putting the large redstone courthouse between him and the oncoming guards.

  Drikall pulled his own hood free and donned blue medical scrubs. “You realize we’re already here. At the plaza. We can’t afford to get too far away.”

  “But we have to break line of sight between us and anyone who might connect us with the surplus business. We do that as many times as is feasible before we get to our second station. Didn’t you know that?”

  “Well, I’m kind of new to all this. Mostly, I drug people. It’s what I’m good at. Which is why I’m confused as to why, when we’re about to prove that Thaal is guilty of so much, we also had to frame him for a crime he didn’t commit. The kidnapping of Ledina Chott.”

  Trey guided the speeder down a side landspeeder lane, then turned to circle the block. “We don’t care if he’s convicted for the kidnapping, and he probably won’t be. But, first, given what he did to his last mistress, and the fact that he was showing a lot of interest in Ledina, by us kidnapping her, we may have prevented him from kidnapping her. Or worse.”

  “A preemptive felony.”

  “There you go. And in kidnapping a celebrity with some interplanetary fame, we have ensured that the civilian news will hear about Thaal and that civilian authorities will launch their own investigations. Not to mention the musicians’ union. You don’t want to mess with the musicians’ union.”

  “Really?”

  “No, I’m kidding. What are they going to do, serenade you to death?”

  A few hundred meters away, Huhunna, Jesmin, and Turman—now wrapped in a simple gray robe and wearing sandals—boarded the Wraiths’ delivery speeder.

  The tall cargo compartment was now divided into two sections, forward and rear, by a thick black curtain. Thaymes sat in the forward section in a side-mounted seat with computer and comm gear packed tightly around him, a headset on his head. He looked relieved when they entered. “You’re late.”

  Jesmin smirked. “We had to run Turman through an airspeeder wash. Without benefit of airspeeder. He was a biohazard.”

  Thaymes glanced back at the curtain shielding the rear compartment. “Well, at least I don’t have to wear that new masquer, which I would have if you’d been a minute later.”

  Turman’s hands came up as if he intended to strangle Thaymes. Huhunna wrapped an arm around him, held him still.

  Jesmin moved back to the side door. “What do I need to know before I go out there?”

  “Lots of city guards on hand. The relays are working fine—the enemy would need a comm genius, like me, to track these broadcasts. Lab Boy’s still setting up the replacement for the scapedroid at the confrontation point. Muscle Boy reports, ‘Kidnapping is thwarted.’ There are two E-wings closing in on Leader and Gambler, intending to kill them. And Stage Boy needs to get into his next outfit right now.”

  Jesmin nodded. “Sounds like business as usual.”

  Several hundred kilometers up, in her cramped personal quarters in the Starfighter Command portion of Rimsaw Station, Colonel Kadana Sorrel heard the medium-priority tone sound on her intercom. She brushed a lock of brown hair out of her eyes and set down the object in her hands—an actual bound book, one of her few personal indulgences. She activated the intercom. “Sorrel here.”

  “Colonel, we have a sort of strange transmission standing by for you ... if you want to take it.” The speaker, her on-duty communications officer, sounded more puzzled than he usually did. “It’s a civilian who won’t identify himself, says he’s going to shake the armed services here until they crack, but it’s nothing personal.”

  “It’s not my husband again, another of his jokes?”

  “Not ... this time.”

  “Sure. Put him on. I could use a laugh.” She turned toward the monitor on her wall. “Face mode, please.”

  The holocam in her monitor buzzed as it adjusted depth of field. Now her caller would see only her face and not realize that she was lounging in her bunk, out of uniform.

  An image materialized on her monitor. It, too, showed only a face. A man’s face, lean and angular. The entire left half of his head was covered by a durasteel-gray shell, and his whole jaw was a prosthetic in an identical color. A gold mechanical eye gleamed in the left side of his face and his right eye was blue. His hair was a solid white and his expression registered somber intensity. “Colonel Sorrel?”

  “I am. And you are?”

  “You wouldn’t know my name. I’ve been dead longer than you’ve been alive. But I’m comming you with a warning.”

  “A threat, you mean.”

  “No, a warning. I’m trying to help you. I’d send a warning to General Thaal, too, if I could. But he’s already dead.”

  The colonel leaned forward. “All right. Let’s hear it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Voort kept his eye on the sensor board. Skifter Station was close ahead, visible to the naked eye, its independently spinning concentric rings glowing in traditional white against the backdrop of space. Also nearby were two E-wings, coming up fast from behind. There was constant chatter on the comm frequencies, civilian and military authorities demanding that Phanan One and Phanan Two take up orbit well away from any other craft and wait for the authorities to arrive.

  “Second act, Two. You ready?”

  “I’m doing my hair.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.” The first laser blast from the pursuers flashed past Voort, then past Skifter Station ahead. “Idiots!”

  “We need to vape them fast, One.”

  Voort put a bit more effort into his evasive maneuvering. “Stand by to break.�
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  Their pursuers drew close and began unloading short, disciplined bursts of laserfire at the two Wraiths. But as they neared Skifter Station, as their greater proximity made it more likely that any missed shot might hit the habitat, they left off firing.

  Voort and Myri shot through the large gaps between rings and spokes. Voort broke to starboard, Myri to port. One E-wing followed each of them. Now they edged even closer.

  Seeing an opportunity, Voort threw all discretionary power into reverse thrust and dropped about fifty meters of relative altitude. His enemy, caught off guard, rocketed past. With no space station in the background, Voort took his shot, but the E-wing pilot was canny enough to go evasive the instant he passed the Wraith. The burst of laserfire went wide.

  Voort began a tight loop back toward the station. On his sensors, he saw Myri doing the same, headed toward the far side of the habitat. Her E-wing enemy remained on her tail.

  Voort approached the outermost ring of the station and oriented himself so that its outer edge was beneath him, as though he were performing terrain-following flying just over the surface of a very small moon. Without gravity to pull at him, it was a tricky maneuver, contrary to pilots’ instincts, like constantly following a planetary surface as it dropped away ahead. On the opposite side of the ring, Myri was doing the same ... and heading straight for Voort.

  Voort’s enemy swung into line right behind him, at a higher relative altitude.

  Voort almost smiled. There it was, pilot’s training and instincts—and the Wraiths playing them like a musical instrument. A combat pilot in a close dogfight preferred to be above and behind his target, utilizing the visual and psychological advantage that position offered. With most starfighter designs, the enemy couldn’t shoot backward. But now, for just one confused moment, there was no way the Pop-Dog could fire on Voort. Any miss would plow into the civilian space station. Any hit might send the X-wing into that habitat.

  The sensor board showed the energies of Myri’s and her pursuer’s thrusters on an incoming arc. Now it was up to Trey—the work Trey had done days earlier, planting a sensor jammer up here on the station’s surface. “Activate Snowfall!”